Wifi Hacking - WEP - Kali Linux Aircrack-ng suite

Alright, this post is written assuming you have Kali Linux up and running on your computer. If not, here is a post on hacking with kali linux. It will tell you about what Kali Linux is, and how to use it. It will guide you through installation process.
So if you are still following, then just follow these simple steps-


Firstly, create a wireless network to crack. Don't use this method on others. It is illegal. Then proceed with the steps below.

1. Find out the name of your wireless adapter.



Alright, now, your computer has many network adapters, so to scan one, you need to know its name. So there are basically the following things that you need to know-
  • lo - loopback. Not important currently.
  • eth - ethernet
  • wlan - This is what we want. Note the suffix associated.
Now, to see all the adapters, type ifconfig on a terminal. See the result. Note down the wlan(0/1/2) adapter.





2. Enable Monitor mode

Now, we use a tool called airmon-ng to  create a virtual interface called mon. Just type 
airmon-ng start wlan0
 Your mon0 interface will be created.



3. Start capturing packets

Now, we'll use airodump-ng to capture the packets in the air. This tool gathers data from the wireless packets in the air. You'll see the name of the wifi you want to hack.
airodump-ng mon0


4. Store the captured packets in a file 

This can be achieved by giving some more parameters with the airodump command
airodump-ng mon0 --write name_of_file

Now the captured packets will be stored in name_of_file.cap
You have to wait till you have enough data (10000 minimum)


5. Crack the wifi

If all goes well ,then you'll be sitting in front of your pc, grinning, finally you've got 10000 packets (don't stop the packet capture yet). Now, you can use aircrack-ng to crack the password. (in a new terminal)
aircrack-ng name_of_file-01.cap 
The program will ask which wifi to crack, if there are multiple available. Choose the wifi. It'll do its job. If the password is weak enough, then you'll get it in front of you. If not, the program will tell you to get more packets. The program will retry again when there are 15000 packets, and so on.

Note : This will not work with WPA-2. Here is a tutorial on -
Hacking wpa/wpa-2 wps with reaver on kali linux


Troubleshooting : Check this link if you failed to hack the network. 

The missing ingredient

Here is a comparatively advanced tutorial which will require you to have gone through this tutorial as well as the missing ingredient one. After you have got the big picture, you can move on to complicated things like speeding up wifi hacking.
Speeding Up WEP Hacking